The present invention relates to network communications and, more specifically, to providing high speed Internet access to users in hotel environments.
Any business traveler who relies on network communications to maintain contact with clients and the home office appreciates the availability of fast and reliable data ports at remote locations such as airport lounges and hotel rooms. The hospitality industry has only recently begun to understand the necessity of providing such high speed data connections to business travelers. In fact, given the explosive growth of network technologies and the corresponding dependence of the business professional on such technologies, hotels which do not move to provide high speed connectivity in guest rooms comparable to the typical office environment will likely lose a substantial portion of their business to hotels which do.
Unfortunately, many hotel rooms are not currently wired to accommodate high speed data traffic. That is, prior to 1990, virtually all hotel rooms were wired to provide only basic telephone service. As late as 1995, less than 10% of hotel rooms were wired to handle standard Ethernet data speeds. Even today, while the major players in the hospitality industry are searching for high speed connectivity solutions, the vast majority of hotel guest and conference rooms are still wired with low quality, single pair connections. One obvious solution would be to completely rewire all of the guest and conference rooms in each hotel facility to provide the desired data transmission capabilities. However, given the prohibitive cost of such an undertaking, a less costly solution would be desirable.
Even if such a costly rewiring were undertaken, there are other problems which are not addressed by an infrastructure upgrade. For example, even if a high speed connection to the hotel's host is provided, it will often be the case that a guest's laptop computer would be incompatible with the hotel network in some way. Thus, each guest's laptop must be configured appropriately in order to communicate with the network and with the Internet beyond. This would likely involve loading special software onto a guest's laptop each time the guest wants to go online. Not only would such a process be cumbersome and annoying to the hotel guest, it may also be unacceptable from the guest's point of view in that reconfiguring the laptop may interfere with the current configuration in undesirable ways.
Neither does a costly wiring upgrade address the administrative and security issues related to providing Internet access via a hotel host. That is, high speed Internet access for hotel guests requires a network at the hotel property and some sort of connection between the hotel network and the Internet, e.g., a T1 or T3 line. A firewall at each hotel property would also be required to protect the internal network from unauthorized access. The existence of the firewall at each property, in turn, requires that most of the control and administration of the local network be performed at the hotel property rather than remotely, thus representing an undesirable redundancy of administrative functions.
Another administrative difficulty related to maintaining each hotel property as a separate Internet host involves the management of IP addresses. Ranges of globally unique 32-bit IP addresses are issued to organizations by a central Internet authority. These addresses are organized in a four octet format. Class A IP addresses are issued to very large organizations and employ the first of the four octets to identify the organization's network and the other three to identify individual hosts on that network. Thus, a class A address pool contains nearly 17 million (224) globally unique IP addresses. With class B addresses, the first two octets are used to identify the network and the last two to identify the individual hosts resulting in 64,000 (216) globally unique IP addresses for each organization. Finally, with class C addresses, the first three octets are used to identify the network and the last octet to identify the individual hosts resulting in only 256 (28) globally unique IP addresses for each organization.
Unfortunately for many medium to large size organizations (1,000 to 10,000 hosts), it has become very difficult, if not impossible, to obtain anything other than a class C address for their networks due to the fact that the class A and B address spaces have been almost entirely locked up. This problem has been addressed to some extent by the use of a Network Address Translation (NAT) protocol. According to such a protocol, when a local host on an organization's network requests access to the Internet, it is assigned a temporary IP address from the pool of globally unique IP addresses available to the organization. The local host is identified by the globally unique address only when sending or receiving packets on the Internet. As soon as the local host disconnects from the Internet, the address is returned to the pool for use by any of the other hosts on the network. For additional details on the implementation of such a protocol please refer to K. Evegang and P. Francis, The IP Network Address Translator (NAT), Request for Comments “RFC” 1631, Cray Communications, NTT, May 1994, the entirety of which is incorporated herein by reference for all purposes.
Such dynamic assignment of IP addresses might be sufficient for certain organizations as long as the number of simultaneous users which require access to the Internet remains below the maximum of 256. However, if, for example, a 1200 room hotel were hosting an Internet technologies seminar it would be extremely likely that the demand for Internet access would exceed the available address pool. All of this also assumes that a major hotel chain would be able to obtain a complete class C pool of addresses for each of its properties; not necessarily a reasonable assumption.
It is therefore desirable to provide methods and apparatus by which each of the properties in a major hotel chain may provide high speed Internet access to each of its guest rooms in a secure, inexpensive, and reliable manner without undue administrative burdens on the individual properties.